


The fire will burn thee to bare bone

by Aesoleucian



Series: every night and all [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: ...shisui lives in a sword au, I legit forgot that itachi is 'a man' in canon, Other, Self-Harm, and the 'other' tag up in the ship category is bc shisui/kisame is m/nb, itachi's got Problems, oh yeah and noncanon pronouns!, shisui is a blood drinking ghost sword au, shisui lives au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-01-25 15:58:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12535556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian
Summary: Itachi has an awful feeling that this is her fault, throwing a sword covered in their clansmen’s blood into the river where he died. As if it weren’t enough to curse her clan, her village, and her brother, she has cursed her cousin as well to be a ghost sword that eternally thirsts for blood. Because it is her fault, and her responsibility, she unsheathes Shisui and makes a long cut on the underside of her arm, holds his blade there as blood wells up. “Drink, then,” she says.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have not actually stopped writing Naruto fanfiction, I just stopped writing enough of any single fic that I can post it. Hopefully that will change! Anyway I am, as they say, back on my Uchiha bullshit. Title is from [a dirge about the journey of the dead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyke-Wake_Dirge).

Itachi doesn’t cry. She didn’t cry when the person she loved in the world most killed himself to protect her. She’s not going to cry now because eight hundred people who wanted Konoha destroyed are dead. Even if many of them were only children. The one child who matters is safe.

He’s safe even from her. She had planned to show him what she’d done, but something held her back at the last moment. She fled to the river and hurled her sword in, hoping it would shatter on the rocks. And then she went to tell the Hokage that she completed her mission.

Now she’s perched on the outer wall, watching the red-tinted column of smoke that rises from the Uchiha ghetto, with dry eyes. Even now Sasuke is in the hospital recovering from nothing. All the loose ends are tied up except herself, but she’s reluctant to leave this, her last look at what has been her home for thirteen years. She feels lost. This is supposed to be a mission like… unlike any other, and it _is_ unlike anything she’s ever done. Her ‘plan,’ such as it is, is to wander until Madara finds her. Even now she will be playing a part. She aches to forget everything and live peacefully somewhere far away, but there’s still one last protection she has to give Sasuke.

She looks down. He was such a sweet boy. He didn’t even know how to hate.

She jumps down and runs along the surface of the river, so she can’t be tracked.

Almost seven kilometers downstream she finds her sword, now washed of the blood of her clan, lodged between two rocks. In the moonlight she inspects it, finding not a scratch or nick anywhere. It should be impossible—there are only stones at the bottom of the Naka Gorge. On the hilt a red eye opens, the wrappings on the hilt like its eyelids. Itachi stares at it, wondering whether it’s even possible to hallucinate with the sharingan activated. Although it looks flat, painted on, the pupil moves to look up at her, and it blinks.

She drops it.

 _That’s very rude_.

She stares down at the sword, now sure she must be hallucinating.

 _I used up all my chakra fixing this sword up, and you know that’s not very much, because I’m seven months dead. The least you could do is… is… Oh, Itachi, I miss you_.

With trembling fingers she picks up the sword. “Shisui,” she whispers.

_Oh, good, you remember me. I don’t suppose I could…?_

“I’d never forget you,” Itachi says. “Of course you can come with me.”

 _I knew it_. His voice sounds like he’s smiling. _So where are we going?_

She looks away, because he probably won’t approve. “I’m going to join a band of missing-nin mercenaries led by Uchiha Madara.”

 _Mm. Yeah. Okay. How about_ don’t _do that._

“It’s a mission given to me by the Hokage,” she says. “Is it all right if I sheathe… you?”

 _That sounds so weird. Go ahead, but make sure my eye is pointing forward_.

“Why do you have an eye?” she asks as she fits the sword into the sheath she still carries on her back.

 _Wouldn’t you want to have an eye if you were suddenly a ghost sword? Also, don’t change the subject. Tell me about your mission_.

She does. It’s nice to have someone to talk to while she runs, if only because it keeps her out of her own head. And because she has desperately missed Shisui; it feels like a missing piece of her has been restored, even as she cut off half her identity with the death of her clan.

They stop somewhere near the border with Lightning Country around noon so Itachi can sleep. When she wakes, after four hours, to Shisui’s voice, she finds a deer looking curiously at her. _You should find something to eat_ , Shisui says.

“I hope you’re not implying that I should eat that deer. It would take much too long to dress it, and I simply don’t need that much meat.”

_I’m getting kind of antsy being a sword. It’s really boring. I want to cut something._

Itachi cuts a fallen branch into sixty-four pieces. Shisui is the sharpest sword she has ever used.

He sighs. _I suppose we should get going, if you’d rather chop wood than eat breakfast_.

She eats a ration bar and uses a D-rank jutsu to purify the water of a nearby stream. And then she heads for the nearest port, where perhaps she will be able to find work. Logically, she ought to take dangerous and high-profile missions so she will be easily noticeable. She doesn’t want to. The first mission she takes is as an escort for a merchant vessel headed to Water Country, in case of pirates.

When the promised pirates do appear, she knocks them all out within a few minutes and takes a few valuables from their ship, offering the rest to her clients. She gets paid double for that. Shisui asks her, _Why didn’t you kill any of them? They were just pirates_.

Alone on the deck she murmurs, “I never took you for someone so inclined to violence for its own sake. I thought I knew you well.”

 _It’s not violence for its own sake!_ He says, sounding chastised. _It’s not that I think they deserve to die. I just… I don’t know why. I’m hungry._

“Hungry,” she says cautiously. She doesn’t take her eyes off the horizon.

_Urgh. This is going to sound so creepy, and it’s a really cliché ghost sword thing to say, so I’m sorry. But I want blood._

Itachi has an awful feeling that this is her fault, throwing a sword covered in their clansmen’s blood into the river where he died. As if it weren’t enough to curse her clan, her village, and her brother, she has cursed her cousin as well to be a ghost sword that eternally thirsts for blood. Because it is her fault, and her responsibility, she unsheathes Shisui and makes a long cut on the underside of her arm, holds his blade there as blood wells up. “Drink, then,” she says.

 _Itachi_ , he says, distressed. _This wasn’t… There are people who deserve to bleed, but you aren’t one of them_.

“Of course I deserve to bleed,” she says. The blood creeps up his blade, thins, and vanishes. “I deserve more than this. I destroyed our entire clan.”

_And who was it who pushed you to do that? Don’t tell me you had the idea on your own. You were ordered by the Hokage, and I’ll eat my sandal if Danzou didn’t have something to do with it._

Itachi bows her head.

_Not that I have sandals any more, obviously! They’re probably rotting at the bottom of the—_

“Don’t,” she murmurs.

There’s a long silence, before he says, _Thanks, anyway. For everything. For the chakra._

Itachi doesn’t ask what he needs the chakra for. It doesn’t matter, because anything she can give him now, she will.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> more self-harm in this one! Itachi's getting into it. also we'll be talking about blood a lot because that's all Shisui thinks about. happy halloween, y'all.

She stops for a few days at an inn near the capital to plan her next move. It quickly becomes routine to make a careful cut every morning for Shisui, somewhere no-one else will see it. She picks up a scroll on healing at a shop in town, and he says no more about what she deserves or doesn’t.

The next job she takes is a bounty on a B-rank Kumo nin who has been sighted near Yu. The bounty she is after is the one that says they only want him dead; she cuts his throat outside the exchange station and holds Shisui’s blade in the gushing remnants of his neck. He doesn’t even struggle because he’s under a genjutsu, eyes vacant and unfocused, and Shisui seems to absorb all the extra blood. It’s very convenient, she thinks distantly, as she drags him into the station. Only when the staring clerk stammers that he’ll get her payment right away does she pull Shisui out of the man’s neck. His blade doesn’t even need to be cleaned. He seems heavier now, as if he’s full.

Because that job was too easy, she takes an A-rank. It’s easy, too. Shisui gorges himself on blood and is silent, and she wonders if he’s as disgusted with himself as Itachi is with herself. She sleeps curled around him now, with her hand wrapped around his hilt. She doesn’t know if he can feel it, but she thinks she can feel his chakra pulsing under her hands, comfortingly alive for a boy who has been dead eight months. Maybe he can feel hers too, if that sense is left to him; she doesn’t ask.

Other times he’s as talkative as he was for Sasuke, a good cousin and a cheerful companion. There was one day, just before Akatsuki found them, that he talked nonstop about politics in the Earth and Cliff capital cities. Even Itachi grew weary of it, but it was such a relief to hear his voice after a week of near-silence that she didn’t tell him to stop.

And two days later a woman appears in front of her as she’s leaving the inn, wearing the distinctive black and red cloak she knows belongs to Akatsuki. “Uchiha Itachi,” she says. Itachi nods. “You were invited to join us several months ago.”

“My contact neglected to give me an address,” says Itachi, and hears Shisui snickering softly in his sheath. They’re still not sure if anyone else can hear him. “I would be happy to join now.”

As she turns and motions for Itachi to follow, Itachi thinks she hears the woman mutter, “A little young, Leader.”

She finds that Akatsuki is still recruiting to fill out its ranks. She is given a partner, Biwa Juuzou, and an assassination mission. Konan doesn’t seem to think a fourteen-year-old will be an effective recruiter. For whatever reason, Itachi gets the impression that Konan and Pein are being soft on her. It irritates her, to be treated like a child. Juuzou treats her like one too, dismissing her requests to train together as pointless. They could have predicted, perhaps, that missing-nin wouldn’t work well together, but she still doesn’t like it.

It ends up being his downfall, just a month after she joins Akatsuki. He won’t accept her help when the Mizukage comes to collect his sword. Afterward she stands with Shisui unsheathed in her hand, hesitating over her bare shin. His sword drank blood, too. She wonders if it was also a person, once.

 _He wasn’t great,_ says Shisui quietly, as if he’s not poised to draw blood. They’ve learned to ignore these things.

“He was my partner,” says Itachi. “It was my duty to protect him, and I failed.”

 _This is going to sound really dumb, but you’re fourteen and he was thirty years old and huge and had a legendary sword. I don’t think this was really your fault_.

“Do you wonder about his sword,” says Itachi as she makes the delicate cut. “It drinks blood just like you.”

 _I don’t drink blood for the iron. Though I guess I use it occasionally. I drink it for the chakra. But I_ could _do whatever I wanted with it, and I don’t think that giant meat cleaver could do anything besides what it was made to do. I wasn’t made to do anything,_ he says proudly, _so I can do everything!_

She watches pensively as he drinks up the blood from her wound—it’s almost meditative, watching how it flows and vanishes. “Could you accept chakra without blood?” she asks as she leans him against a rock and starts to heal her leg. “It’s not that I mind, but I spend twice the chakra to heal myself afterward.”

_I never asked you to do that! It’s not like you don’t kill enough people anyway._

“Can you?”

 _…No, I don’t think so. I’ve tried. But if you don’t want to give me your blood then you don’t have to. I’m not the one who chose to do that, so don’t pretend like it’s on me._ When she’s silent for a while he sighs and says, _You think of it as some kind of atonement, right? Making yourself anemic isn’t going to make anything better. Stay healthy for Sasuke._

 

Itachi starts taking iron supplements.

 

She’s paired with Kakuzu for just one mission, and she’s on edge the entire time. He’s already killed two partners, which makes her think that maybe Leader is trying get her killed too—a feeling she’s familiar with, after working for Danzou. In the end, he’s startlingly polite for a member of Akatsuki, and only threatens her twice. Still, she’s relieved when Konan-san tells her to meet her new partner on the Fire-Water border and bring zir back to base.

She sits on a disused, bone-white dock in a ghost town, polishing Shisui’s blade, for about half an hour before her new partner arrives. First she senses an incredible amount of chakra; she hears heavy but careful footsteps on the dry planks; and then ze speaks. “Did you know that some sharks are ovoviviparous?” Itachi wonders why ze chose _that_ to be zir first impression. She starts folding up Shisui’s polishing cloth. “Ovoviviparous means—”

“Bearing young by hatching eggs within the body. I know.”

“In most species, they’re perfectly willing to eat their siblings while they’re still in the womb,” ze says cheerfully. When Itachi stands up and sheathes Shisui, she understands why ze bothered; zir skin is a pale blue-gray and zir mouth is full of shark’s teeth. Juuzou just filed his, and otherwise they must have been as blunt as any other human’s. This shinobi looks to be half-shark genetically.

“Is that supposed to be a threat?” Itachi asks, honestly curious. “Or do you always introduce yourself by sharing facts about sharks?” Shisui snickers in his sheath and whispers, _I’m hoping for the second one, that’s the kind of person I could get to like_.

Zir smile widens, incidentally showing off even more of zir teeth. “What a keen mind you have. Are you Itachi?”

“I am. I wasn’t informed who my partner was to be, but I recognize you from the bingo book. You’re Hoshigaki Kisame.” She doesn’t mention that zir information in Ame’s bingo book is extremely outdated, giving zir height as a good ten centimeters less than it is now. Ze probably knows.

“So I am. Pleased to meet you. This is Samehada.” Ze takes an enormous, bandage-wrapped bundle down from zir back, and holds it out to Itachi. She looks down at it for a moment, uncertain what she’s supposed to do, before ze says, “Samehada, Uchiha Itachi, our new partner. Just take a little of her chakra, so you’ll know her. She’s off-limits after today.”

Ah. She bites the side of her thumb and presses a dot of blood to the bandages on the tip. _If ze’s introducing zir sword you have to introduce me_ , Shisui is insisting, but she doesn’t answer, because Kisame is giving her an odd look.

“Samehada isn’t like a summons. You don’t have to give it your blood for it to recognize you.”

She suppresses a frown to keep her face smooth and blank. “Can it absorb chakra without using blood as a medium, then?”

“You’re a weird kid. Of course it can.”

“My sword, Shisui, only drinks blood,” she says, drawing him again. “It wanted to be introduced as well.”

_It? Rude little cousin!_

“Oho,” says Kisame, bending down to look at Shisui. “This is a very nice sword.” Ze runs a thumb along Shisui’s blade and a tiny bead of blood wells up, then disappears. “What do you mean it _wanted_ to be introduced? Talking sword, is it?”

“Yes,” says Itachi.

“Well, well. We’d better get going, hadn’t we?” Ze turns, slinging Samehada over zir back again, and starts walking back up the dock.

 _Mm_ , says Shisui. _See if you can find an excuse to spar with zir. Zir blood’s the richest I’ve ever had_.

“And you’re a connoisseur now?” murmurs Itachi, amused and a little worried by how much blood he’s had over the past few months. Still. “Of course we’ll spar. I could hardly work with someone if I didn’t find out their fighting style.”

_That’s why it ended so badly with Juuzou._

“It is,” she agrees. “One of… many reasons.”

 

Kisame is a pleasant partner, better than anyone save Shisui himself. Ze respects Itachi’s frequent wish for silence as well as Shisui’s frequent wish to spar. Ze has a lot more blood than Itachi does, which she and Shisui find convenient. She doesn’t stop offering Shisui her blood, though. It’s a ritual she finds comforting, and she begins, rather superstitiously, to believe that a mission won’t go well if she doesn’t have a chance to offer her blood.

Shortly before she turns fifteen Kisame walks into the room they’re sharing at an inn to find her with her robe pulled up, slicing Shisui’s blade across her thigh. Ze raises zir eyebrows at her; embarrassed, she tries to hold zir gaze while she puts Shisui down and heals her leg. “I’m not gonna judge you for what you choose to do in private,” ze says, leaning against the doorframe, “but if my partner’s anemic I might have to discourage her from storing too much of her blood in her sword. Just in case it affects your fighting, you understand.”

“I take iron supplements,” she says, pulling her robe back down to cover her leg. Her healing isn’t perfect, and she knows ze saw the rest of the scars. It doesn’t really matter.

“Iron supplements are shit, kid,” says Kisame. “They’re literally just ground-up iron. Your body can’t use that. You need red meat to get back what you’ve lost. Come on, we’re going for yakiniku.”

Itachi thought she knew what kind of relationship they had; clearly, she doesn’t. Bemused, she follows Kisame to a local restaurant, where ze exposits at length on mineral bioavailability. Shisui laughs quietly in her head the whole time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sometimes I get pissed off that Kishimoto designed 13-year-old Itachi to look like an adult because he wanted her to be intimidating. guys: she was thirteen!! she has the emotional maturity of a slightly precocious thirteen-year-old kid, eg, Sasuke in part 1. and like many slightly precocious baby teens (and Sasuke) she kind of wants to be dead. thank goodness Kisame is here with barbecue and shark facts to keep her in line. Ze's 27 here and as far as I understand it has not wanted to die for a good decade or so.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pictured: "let's get along and have a good time" except everyone is a traumatized evil ninja

_Itachi._

Her eyelids are sticking together, in such a way that they’re very hard to open.

_Itachi, can you hear me? Groan once for yes._

All she can manage is a pointed exhale.

_Little cousin, I’m starting to get very worried about you! Can you move?_

Itachi makes a noise that she hopes sounds like “No.”

_Fuck. All right. Fuck. Guess I’m going to have to try something. Hoshigaki! HOSHIGAKI!_

“Who’s that?”

_Hi, Shisui, talking sword. Not important right now. Your partner is bleeding out and you haven’t noticed? Shouldn’t you be able to smell that sort of thing?_

“Well, talking sword Shisui, everyone here is covered in blood. Ah, Itachi. I see you at least managed to take him out after he got you.”

Itachi hums faintly, because it’s polite to acknowledge that ze’s talking to her. She feels zir hands scooping her up; tries to tighten her fingers around Shisui’s hilt, but doesn’t have the strength. “Shsu,” she says as he falls from her hand.

_What she means to say is, don’t leave me behind, I’m very important._

Kisame’s arms shift, and Shisui is placed across her chest.

 

When she wakes up, her fingers are wrapped around his hilt again, but he’s sheathed. “Shisui,” she whispers.

 _How are you feeling?_ he asks, just as Kisame’s voice says, “Your sword is the first one you greet? Aren’t your priorities a little backward?”

“Not the best,” she says, and struggles to open her eyes. Staring up at the ceiling she continues, “My eyes were closed, Kisame-san. But I could feel Shisui. Thank you for putting him in my hands; it helps me sleep better. I didn’t mean it as a slight on you.”

Ze chuckles from the other end of the room. “Sure, kid. I have to admit, I was kind of surprised to find out your sword actually talks. I thought it was more in the vein of Samehada. I can tell what it wants, even if it doesn’t speak.”

 _I’m sure Samehada is extremely respectable, but I still take offense at being compared to it._ Shisui is using his too-prim voice, the one that means it’s mostly a joke. _I don’t think it was ever a person, or at least not recently._

That puts an awful image in Itachi’s mind, of Shisui a hundred years from now, still trapped inside a sword and unable to remember how to speak. But Kisame says, “Oho! And you were?”

 _My dear cousin neglected to introduce me properly. She even called me an it! Uchiha Shisui, at your—well, at_ her _service. And to answer your next two questions, it was an accident, and I had already been dead for seven months when it happened._

“Is it really wise to tell zir that?” Itachi murmurs.

_Doesn’t matter now!_

She sighs, and presses her lips to the butt of Shisui’s hilt. “Just as aggravating as you were when you were alive,” she says, not without fondness.

“As always,” says Kisame, “I’ll do my best to prove myself worthy of your trust, as long as you extend me the same courtesy.” However nice the sentiment is, the way ze says it makes it sound like a threat.

“I can’t see how betraying you would profit me,” says Itachi. In the long term, of course, she is lying, because her mission may well require her to betray zir. But at this moment it is true. “It seems prudent to have someone like you as an ally.”

“Well, that’s what I thought, too, but people in Kiri _did_ insist on betraying me repeatedly. I rather wish I’d destroyed more of it before I became a missing-nin. In summary, Itachi-san, pretty words prove nothing. Only your actions will make me believe you.”

“Fair,” she says faintly. “I think I’m going to… go back…”

 _To sleep_.

 

She begins to discover that Shisui’s unique nature also gives him some unique properties, even aside from being able to absorb chakra through blood. She has been wondering what he _does_ with the chakra he drinks; ten months after joining Akatsuki, while fighting a missing-nin swordsman from Kumo, she realizes that even a lightning-imbued sword can’t cut through his blade.

“You use lightning, too?” the missing-nin spits at her.

“No,” says Itachi. She glances down at Shisui.

 _Just a little trick I’ve been working on_ , he says, sounding smug. _I’ve had it for a while, you just never noticed_.

She looks back up at the missing-nin. “It would be easier for you if you surrendered now.”

“Oh? Going to promise you’ll leave me alive?” he sneers.

“I don’t tell untruths,” says Itachi, which is technically true. She goes to great lengths to avoid it, even when she’s lying. “So I can’t promise that. But I will promise that your death will be much, much less painful.”

“Where’s the fun in efficiency?” says Kisame cheerfully, braining the man in one swing of zir enormous sword. “You can be such a buzzkill, Itachi-san. Aren’t kids supposed to be more energetic?”

Itachi doesn’t reply; she only flickers to the man’s side and starts to heal his half-crushed face, so he’ll be recognizable at the bounty station. _I hope you left him alive for me,_ says Shisui. _The dying chakra is always the sweetest!_

“Must you?” murmurs Itachi. She finds his bloodthirstiness—at least, the nonliteral kind—distasteful.

 _If you’re not going to live up to the vicious, power-mad missing-nin image of an Akatsuki member, I have to do it for you_.

“I don’t think Kisame cares much.” But she takes the man’s head by the hair and slices it cleanly off—Shisui isn’t just more resistant, he also seems to be impossibly sharp, because it’s like cutting through tofu.

_Hey, hey, I have a new image I want to try out. What if you never talked, and I did all the talking for you? It’d be really mysterious, and you could pass for a guy if you had to. It would look like you were my puppet! Super creepy, right?_

She almost laughs as she stands up, but in the end she keeps her face totally neutral. She can tell from the quality of his voice that he’s speaking only to her and not to Kisame. “Why don’t you ask Kisame’s opinion on that? I’m sure ze will find it more entertaining than I do.”

 _Aw, you’re no fun. Oi, Kisame!_ She can almost hear it when he’s talking to Kisame, like an itch deep in her ears. She wonders whether ze can hear it when he’s talking to her.

Kisame does laugh at his idea. “I think you should try it, Itachi-san. I want to see the looks on their faces.”

“Do what you want.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this one Shisui does some dumb shit, Itachi regrets enabling him, and also Orochimaru is there

The next bounty mission they go on, Itachi doesn’t speak at all. It’s curiously restful, pretending to be nothing more than Shisui’s puppet; he does what he does best (dramatics) and she does what she does best (kenjutsu). Shisui and Kisame are both delighted when the stoic monk they’re fighting goes from uneasy to terrified by Shisui’s promises to drink his blood.

Itachi knocks him out and makes a shallow cut across his arm, for Shisui’s sake, and then lets Kisame pick him up to take him to the nearest exchange station. She doesn’t like playing with her victims, using them for entertainment. Shisui wouldn’t have either, when he was alive. It troubles her that she doesn’t know whether he’s acting, or whether he really does enjoy tormenting their bounties before handing them in. Itachi is unable to forget that this monk, now their captive, will be tortured for information.

She is very aware, not for the first time, that she is a bad person. It’s a stupid concept for a ninja, but she has always held her morals more strongly than those she worked with. She only hoped… that Shisui would never be among them.

That night, Shisui asks for his eye back.

“Where are you going to… keep it?” Itachi asks, turning him over in her hands.

 _Ah. Good point. I hadn’t thought that far. The eye I’m using right now is more or less painted on… I’ll have to make a place for it. I’ll get back to you tomorrow_.

And in the morning the eye on Shisui’s hilt has been replaced by a spherical pit. _I don’t like being blind,_ he says. _Hurry up and put it in_.

She calls Suchi and strokes the crow’s feathers, looking into Shisui’s spinning mangekyou sharingan. “I need it back, please,” she says. “This may hurt, but you need to stay still.” Suchi obediently turns her head and freezes in place while Itachi digs the eye out of her socket. It’s clean of blood, now, but it still feels as warm, as wet, as _alive_ as it did the day Shisui put it in her hand. “Thank you for keeping it for me,” she says, and places it in the hole Shisui has made in his hilt. The wrappings slide over the edges of the eye to keep it in place, like eyelids; it blinks, swivels.

_This is SO much better, cousin. I’d forgotten how nice sharingan are._

“Can you deactivate your sharingan?” Itachi asks, glancing at the door. “It would save chakra.”

 _Hmm, hold on… No, it doesn’t look like it. I think you need to have a body,_ specifically _an Uchiha body, to switch it on or off. That’s a pity. I think if I close it, though…_ The wrappings shift to cover his eye. _It uses less chakra, anyway. I hate to ask you for more blood, since you already do so much…_

“But you are asking anyway.” She lets neither approval nor disapproval enter her voice, but he seems to sense that her patience is finally wearing out.

_Itachi? Is it…_

“Why do you need sharingan? An asset with little practical value, which, if you are separated from me, will eventually drain your chakra entirely? You will need to be extraordinarily careful, Shisui. You are nothing but chakra, as it stands now. This could kill you.”

 _I’m already dead_ , he says sulkily.

She closes her eyes and swallows. “Not as dead as you could be. I can live without you, I know from experience. But I don’t wish to.”

 _You don’t get it, Itachi! There’s almost nothing I can do! I’m a_ sword _, I can’t move or use any kind of jutsu, I have to rely completely on whoever’s wielding me! This is one thing I could do—I could use genjutsu, maybe even save your life in battle. If I need to I can use Kotoamatsukami. It’s—_ He seems to be struggling for words. She puts a hand on his hilt, hoping it will bring him some comfort. _I need to do something for you in return. I have no freedom. I need it, Itachi. I_ need _it. I’m going insane_.

Her breath catches in her throat and her fingers still. She doesn’t think he meant that idiomatically.

 _I wasn’t meant to be here. I’m not… Itachi, you have to understand, I’m not alive. This isn’t anything like living. My mind doesn’t…_ He makes a noise of frustration, and then is quiet.

“We will be careful,” says Itachi softly. “Let me know if your chakra levels ever get too low.”

A choked laugh. _Ask Kisame to make a donation. Ze’s got chakra coming out zir ears. They don’t call zir the tailless tailed beast for nothing, got it?_

Itachi picks him up and kisses the end of his hilt. “Yes, cousin.”

 

She doesn’t ask Kisame to make a donation until the first time Shisui uses his eye. It happens in an ambush; a squad of Konoha ANBU that has come to chase them out of Fire Country after they stayed too long. Itachi is terribly glad that they are all masked. Even after everything, she doesn’t want to kill Konoha nin.

 _Let me deal with them_ , says Shisui, opening his eye wide. She parries a strike and turns him to look at the ANBU—the woman stops in her tracks, and Itachi kicks her in the chest, sending her crashing against a tree. Now she’s out of the way.

“Your chakra?”

_I have enough. Next._

He takes down half the squad in this way. Kisame comes to find them later; ze looks down at the bodies and says, “Huh. What’d you do to them?”

“Shisui wanted to try a new technique,” she says.

 _I’m starved._ He says it pointedly, as if he can sense her reluctance. _You can show zir, though_.

She holds Shisui out, hilt-first, to Kisame, who looks into Shisui’s eye and grins. “Oho, this is new. I don’t remember you having a human eye, Shisui.”

 _It’s even mine,_ says Shisui. _I can’t turn off my mangekyou, though, so I use a lot more chakra. You’re willing to donate, right?_

“Sure,” ze says easily, leaning Samehada against a tree. “I’ve got more than enough. Itachi-san…?”

She releases her grip and ze takes Shisui, cutting a deep gash in zir arm. _Mmm. Sorry, cousin, I have a new favorite missing-nin._

“You’ll have to fight Samehada if you want me,” says Kisame, grinning zir shark grin at him. “And it’s much better at chakra absorption than you are, so keep that in mind.”

They both laugh. Itachi does not. She doesn’t like what being a sword has done to him, never has, but for the past two years she has been weighed down by the conviction that there is nothing she can do. Now, though, she wonders. His original body is irretrievable, but there may be some way to get _a_ body.

She spends the next year, between missions (and they do have a lot of time between missions), researching body transfer jutsu. She hides it from Shisui. She doesn’t want to give him false hope, and… she almost fears that he will tell her to stop. That he may have decided he wants to continue as he is. That perhaps Kisame’s blood and the ability to do genjutsu are compensation enough.

Once she has enough, she decides to see Orochimaru, despite knowing that the snake will take any opportunity to attack her and steal her eyes. She leaves Shisui with Kisame. He doesn’t like it, which surprises her; it seemed to her that he didn’t like being dependent on her for everything, but he is fierce in his insistence in staying with her.

“It is too dangerous for you, specifically,” she says. “If I am killed or captured, what would happen to you would be much worse.”

_That only makes me want to come with you more, idiot! Kisame, make her stay!_

“Hmm,” says Kisame. “Where is it you’re trying to go, exactly?”

“Why do you need to know, if you don’t intend on following me?”

Ze chuckles. “I don’t. Unless it becomes necessary to retrieve your body. We don’t want those eyes of yours falling into unfriendly hands, do we?”

Itachi puts her hand over Shisui’s eye and mouths, _Orochimaru_. Kisame’s eyebrows go up in surprise. “Those really are unfriendly hands.”

 _This is for him,_ she says, nodding at Shisui.

 _You’re keeping secrets from me now, cousin?_ Shisui’s voice is almost a growl, bitter and angry.

Kisame ignores him. “You might have to drop this if Leader finds a mission for us.”

“I will do what I have to,” says Itachi. “I should be back within two weeks.” And she flickers away, leaving them behind her.

 

Orochimaru still has a laboratory at the headquarters in Ame. Itachi is relieved to find her there. Perhaps not relieved, but at least it’s convenient, and won’t throw off her schedule.

Itachi knocks politely at the open door of the main-level laboratory—Orochimaru seems to have no need to close it, since her reputation does all the work for her. “A visitor!” calls Orochimaru’s raspy voice, delighted. “Do come in, Itachi-kun. I certainly wasn’t expecting you to walk into my laboratory of your own free will.” Itachi comes in further and finds her pipetting clear liquid between two sets of tiny glass vials. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” she asks more softly, putting her pipette down to look at Itachi.

“I’m looking for a way to create a living human body with no soul,” says Itachi.

Orochimaru chuckles. “If I had a way to do that, do you think I’d still be in this body?”

“I don’t know,” Itachi says. “Would you?”

“I might.” Orochimaru smiles at her. “You must want it very badly to come here. Which means I can ask anything I want as payment.”

“Within reason. I won’t allow you to take over my body.”

“Mm. A pity. There’s not much else I really want from you.” She turns back to her vials, pointedly ignoring Itachi.

“But I may be able to find you another suitable body.”

“All I would ask from you is a little DNA,” says Orochimaru. “Your body will still be suitable.”

 _I think you need to have a body,_ specifically _an Uchiha body, to switch it on or off,_ Shisui said. Orochimaru can get her an Uchiha body. All she needs now is confirmation… “Do you know anything about soul transfer?”

Orochimaru laughs loudly this time. “What _have_ you gotten yourself into, Itachi-kun? I’ll make you a very good deal: I will do all the necessary research into soul transfer, and all you have to do is come when I call. How does that sound?”

“Fine. Here are my notes.”

“Oh, how kind! Now, if I could just have—”

Itachi flickers away across the room. “If I give you what you want now, I have no guarantee of your sincerity. If you need to practice, clone yourself.”

“What a rude child,” murmurs Orochimaru. “Very well. You’ll know when to find me.”

Itachi bows, although Orochimaru is not looking at her, and leaves.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter: it's sasuke!; kisame saves the day; itachi gives it up

Shisui sulks for over a week after she comes back, but she cannot tell him yet. He gets over it; he has never been one to hold a grudge, especially not against Itachi. She had been hoping that nothing more eventful than assassinations would happen before Orochimaru got back to her, but it takes a long time. So long that she returns to Konoha before she returns to Orochimaru’s laboratory.

Itachi and Shisui have always kept an ear out for news about their village, and a few months after Itachi turns seventeen they catch word that the Third Hokage has finally been killed… by Orochimaru. Itachi feels a little betrayed that Orochimaru is doing _that_ rather than the work that she commissioned (tries hard not to lose herself in mourning for the village), but Shisui points out that there is no-one now to check Danzou’s power. This is concerning not only because of what it might mean for the village—Danzou’s version of “in Konoha’s best interest” is very different from anyone else’s—but what it might mean for Sasuke. Itachi decides to pay a visit to remind Danzou of his promise to protect her brother.

Kisame comes along because ze has never seen Konoha, and ze thinks it might be fun.

That is how Itachi finds herself sitting in her favorite tea shop across from Kisame, restraining herself from ordering any daifuku. It’s surreal. The restaurant hasn’t changed at all in the four years she has been away, and she feels as though she has stepped into the past. Only Shisui’s murmuring voice in the back of her head, and Kisame’s black and red shape, remind her of what she’s here for.

Her former captain, Kakashi, leans against the doorway, talking to someone, and after a minute or so her brother appears next to him. _Vanish, now,_ says Shisui, and they flicker away, leaving two half-full cups of tea steaming on the table.

Itachi regrets it. It was good tea. And she wants to see Sasuke—

Later, for the sake of plausible deniability, they track Konoha’s young jinchuuriki out to a nearby village and make a cursory attempt to capture him. Leader has told them that the jinchuuriki capture phase is about to start, so if pressed it will be easy to claim that they were simply being proactive. Uzumaki Naruto is a bright child, though not in the sense that he’s clever—just very easy to track. He isn’t able to put up much resistance either without Jiraiya of the Sannin to watch over him, but of course he is only twelve years old. Even Itachi, at twelve, could not have resisted herself and Kisame as they are now. And Naruto is nothing like Itachi at twelve.

She’s trying to think of a way she could possibly fail to capture him when her brother appears in front of him, face almost gray. She wants his expression to be fear, rage, resolve, but she can’t read it. She’s so unused to seeing anything on his face but disappointment.

“Sasuke,” she says, expressionless. “You’ve grown up. But not enough to take me down, I think.”

“Is it true, then?” he snarls. “Tell me they lied. Tell me it wasn’t you.”

“You always have been foolish, little brother,” she says with regret. He has never been able to take a hint. “Do you want me to show you?” Her mangekyou sharingan spin up, and she sees fear cross his face. He stays silent, and she is left to grapple with her unwillingness to show him what she did. She has no reason not to—

“So this is your brother?” says Kisame, peering over her shoulder. “What a little twerp. You might as well give up on him ever posing a challenge. Better to fight someone who’s worth your time.”

“There’s no harm in letting him ripen for a little longer,” she says vaguely. If she wants him to pursue her, she really _is_ going to have to show him the oceans of blood she waded through to protect their village. And still she doesn’t want to.

“Why?” Sasuke’s eyes shine with tears he hasn’t shed yet. He looks so much like the little boy who pouted when she had to go on long missions. She closes her eyes so she won’t have to look at him.

“To test my capabilities. No other reason.”

She’s saved at that moment by the return of the Sannin Jiraiya; she and Kisame have to make their escape through the wall of some enormous frog’s intestines, and she is guiltily spared from having to hurt her brother, even for his own good.

“He really is a twerp,” says Kisame as they leave. “You’re putting your faith in _him_? He looks like a stiff breeze would knock him over.”

She doesn’t answer. It’s her fault he doesn’t have the resolve to kill her, the strength that he will need to survive as an enemy of Madara.

 

Orochimaru contacts her only a month later, via a small snake that coils around her neck, waking her from uneasy sleep. “I have a message for you,” it says quietly. “A location.”

 _What’s that?_ asks Shisui sharply from his sheath. _Don’t tell me you’ve been in contact with Orochimaru._

“I have a good reason,” she says, unwrapping the snake from her neck and accepting a slip of paper from its mouth. “You will learn it very soon, I think.”

_Take me with you this time. I can help you against her._

“I don’t expect to be fighting her. We made a deal.”

_As if that has any bearing on whether you’ll be fighting her! She’s so treacherous even Akatsuki couldn’t keep her! Why would she keep her word to you?_

“She fears my eyes,” says Itachi. She hopes it’s enough.

But she does take Shisui with her. Kisame, she suspects, follows them, and though her pride wouldn’t let her accept help from zir it’s comforting to know that ze may be able to rescue Shisui if it comes to that. Orochimaru’s new laboratory is more a burrow than anything else, hidden away in Rice Paddy Country where Itachi hears she has set up a new hidden village. Itachi sends a shadow clone into the underground complex, because she is not a fool. She waits, tense, in a nearby tree, until the clone dispels itself and she receives the information it gathered. “She seems to be sincere,” she reports to Shisui. “I may need to tell her about you, but under no circumstances should you open your eye.”

 _I knew_ that _,_ says Shisui in a grumble. _Why would she need to know about me, though?_

“The information I am looking for is to make you a body.”

Shisui has no tells while he inhabits a sword; he doesn’t even make any sound unless he wants to. So she doesn’t know what he’s thinking until she’s some way into the compound. _Why…_ he starts. He never finishes the question. _Whatever she’s asking from you can’t be small._

“She wants my DNA,” Itachi murmurs, conscious of the guards who are now following her. “It will give her access to sharingan, if I don’t find a way to destroy what she has after she creates your body.”

_Uh, it also means she’s going to torture a baby clone of you until they activate their sharingan._

A foreign feeling begins to burn in Itachi’s gut, but there’s nothing she can do about that now. “That’s a risk I’ll have to take.”

 _Would you feel any different if it were a clone of Sasuke?_ Shisui wonders.

Itachi’s breath catches in her chest, and she smooths it out with some effort. “It’s not.”

_Do you ever think about who you were when you were four years old? Didn’t you try to heal a guy on the battlefield and almost get killed? You used to be so… gentle. Me? I was a real idiot when I was four. Even after Chusue died and I got my mangekyou, I really didn’t understand shit about how the world worked._

“A clone will not have my memories,” she murmurs. “It won’t be me. I don’t understand why you’re trying to convince me not to get you a body.”

 _I’m not! I just think there’s got to be a safer place to get it than_ Orochimaru _, you know?_

“Nonetheless, this is expedient.”

Shisui sighs loudly, but says no more on the subject. He must be getting antsy, because he has to keep his eye closed while they’re in Orochimaru’s compound.

Itachi goes in, submits silently to a blood draw, and then asks, “How long will it be?”

“Until your clone reaches adulthood? Two months. Even I cannot make it quicker than that.”

Itachi doesn’t like it, and Shisui doesn’t either. _She’s lying_ , he says. _I don’t even know which part is the lie, or what she hopes to gain, but she’s lying._

Itachi taps twice on his hilt, for _yes_. Orochimaru seems to think it means she’s impatient, because she says, “You can take it or leave it. Either way I will be making a clone. It is up to you whether you wish to claim it.”

Itachi nods and flickers away, because she has no other choice. She will come back to destroy everything once Shisui is safe. No matter how many clones of herself she has to kill along the way.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in this one itachi finally possesses an itachi clone! and in a different sense, shisui finally possesses an itachi clone.

She doesn’t start destroying Orochimaru’s laboratory immediately once she has what she wanted, of course. She bows and thanks Orochimaru, and leaves. She carries the body back to where Kisame is waiting in one of their bases. When ze sees it ze says, “Huh.” Itachi cocks her head at zir a little, and ze says, “I was expecting it to look like you.”

Itachi looks down at it, watching its chest rise and fall evenly as if it were asleep, although its eyes are open. Ze’s right. It doesn’t look like her at all. Its face is unlined, its hair cropped short, and its eyes plain black. It’s also several years older than she is. “Shisui, I’m going to start the ritual. I’ll tell you when to begin chakra transfer.” Shisui has an abundance of yin chakra, and the body has plenty of yang chakra. It will take a while to train it to any useful fitness, but Shisui is nothing if not determined.

She begins drawing the seals, with Shisui and Kisame watching patiently. Or perhaps Shisui is impatient. It’s difficult to tell. Finally she uses the tip of Shisui’s blade to draw one last delicate seal directly over the body’s heart. “Do it now,” she says, and feels Shisui’s chakra beginning to pour into the body.

It stops breathing.

Her cousin takes his first breath.

He makes a long, whispery groaning sound interspersed with sibilants, which Itachi eventually realizes with horror is him trying to talk. He’s forgotten how to use a mouth. He’s forgotten how to use human eyes, too—his eyelids are fluttering rapidly, neither closed nor entirely open. She’s struck by the sudden fear that the transfer didn’t work, that he’s neither inside her sword nor inside the body.

“Shisui, can you hear me?”

The body makes a shaky noise that could either be a sound of pain or the word _yes_.

“Give me some sign that it worked, please.”

A long sigh, that eventually turns into her name. “Hhhhhhiiii…tachi. Don’t… worry… so much…” She catches up one of his hands and kisses his knuckles, unspeakably grateful to know that he is alive. _Alive_ , truly. Itachi releases tension she didn’t know she’s been carrying for five years, in one long sigh.

Kisame kneels down by Shisui too, and he lets his head loll to the side so he can look at zir. “Y’look good in 3D,” he says, and Kisame lets out a startled laugh.

“Save it for when you’ve figured out how to talk,” ze tells him, amused, and pats his shoulder. “You want to sit up?”

“Want my eye,” he says faintly.

“Which eye do you want it to be?” Itachi asks.

“Right. Right’s fine.”

She numbs his face for the operation, because he hasn’t felt pain in so long. But it’s quick; Uchiha eyes have always been eager to be transplanted. She wraps the transplant in bandages so that he won’t try to open it for a week or so. The rhythm of her heart seems erratic, and once or twice she has to spike her chakra to make sure this isn’t genjutsu. Kisame helps him into a sitting position against the wall; he’s clenching and unclenching his hands, trying to run them over everything. “K’same, c’mere. I wanna know if you r’ly feel like a shark.”

Obligingly Kisame takes Shisui’s hand and smiles as he clumsily picks up each individual finger and smooths his thumbs over zir knuckles, zir palm, zir broad neatly trimmed fingernails. “And do I?” ze asks.

“Little bit. Not as much as Samehada, I bet. I’d ask to… hmmm.” He closes his eyes as if tired.

“You’d ask to feel it, but you’ve had enough of losing chakra to weird inanimate objects,” Kisame fills in.

“’m gonna miss drinking your blood,” he says sleepily. “Your chakra’s nice.”

“It’s not off the table entirely,” Kisame tells him, patting his hand. “For now, you should sleep.” Ze moves him carefully to Itachi’s futon, gives him another curiously tender smile, and then looks up at Itachi. “Well,” ze says, “what on earth are we going to do with him?”

“What did we do with him before?” asks Itachi, not entirely rhetorically. “Stop him from doing anything too stupid or bloodthirsty?”

“Help him do stupider, more bloodthirsty things?” suggests Kisame. Itachi gives zir a disapproving look, and ze laughs. “Your idea is fine too. I don’t know how we’re going to explain this to Leader-sama, though. Imagine leaving him anywhere while we seal a bijuu. We’d return and find the place destroyed, him missing, and something burned down.”

Itachi sighs. “Perhaps we can send him for groceries every time we need to seal a bijuu. He’d be so offended once he realized what was happening.” There’s a pause, while they both look at Shisui, sleeping with his mouth open and one hand dropped carelessly across his chest. He doesn’t look like the cousin Itachi remembers—his nose was bigger and his face rounder, as if it was built for his frequent smiles. His hair is thin and straight now like Itachi’s. She mourns it, a little. His wild hair was another thing that made him Shisui.

She lets out a breath and slowly puts her hand over her eyes. “I could have given Orochimaru a sample of _his_ DNA,” she murmurs. “She wouldn’t have even had to know he was an Uchiha.”

Kisame claps her on the shoulder and says cheerfully, “I feel that the most Uchiha thing you could do in this situation is realize that hindsight is perfect, two months after commissioning a clone of yourself.”

“Do you think we could kill him again and ask for a new one?” she mumbles into her hand.


End file.
